Blasting and Backlogging

While I'm deep in XCOM: Enemy Unknown, I've been trying to play something new each week from the backlog.

Offspring Fling! - This must have come from an indie bundle at some point. It's a puzzle game where you play a forest creature who must navigate puzzle/platform levels while finding and ushering her offspring through them to the exit. One of the main things you can do to that end is to pick them up and hurl them across the level in a straight line. They will continue on all the way across without dropping at all until they hit something that obstructs their path, and then drop straight down. The levels couple this fact and the fact that the offspring are stacked on your character's head, increasing her height, and necessitating tunnels with a higher clearance, to come up with navigation and dexterity challenges. From the outset, there are 100 levels, mostly confined to a single screen, at least through the first 49 that I saw. It's a kind of cool little game, with a decent challenge curve as you get into it. After about an hour I had had enough, though. It's more than I can say for a lot of games, though.

Pokemon Picross - Picross is almost its own genre of puzzle game as far as I know. You have a grid of squares, most puzzles being 10x10, it seems, and you have to shade some of them in, based on numeric hints as to the number in the row or column to be shaded in each before there is an unshaded square or squares. When the puzzle is complete, the shaded squares make up an image of some sort. Pokemon Picross adds the wrinkle of a Pokemon theme, Pokemon bonuses at the outset or in the middle of each puzzle (reveal a few squares' true natures, etc.), and the F2P staple "energy" mechanic, which is just a progress gate that can be passed by paying a little money or by coming back after a timer has counted down. You also need to earn gems to move on to the next puzzle. It strikes me as Nintendo or The Pokemon Company's first foray into the mobile/F2P games paradigm, though this was a (free) 3DS game. The Pokemon and F2P trappings only serve to put me off, but I don't really know if I find Picross itself very interesting, either. It's not entirely dissimilar to Hexcells, but for some reason doesn't click with me at all in the way that game does.

Mostly, I have been laser-focused on XCOM in the last week or so. I finally managed to win a raid on the aliens' base, and now have my squad all up to colonel or major rank, all with titan armor and plasma weapons, and now I'm beginning to create advanced fighter aircraft to shoot down UFOs with weapons that will minimize damage to the alien craft. My satellite coverage is almost complete, though two nations have pulled out of the project. The next big task is to build the base facility for psionics and delve into that. I think I'll also get a couple of suits of the final armor types that offer stealth/flight/psi abilities and bonuses, as well. With luck I'll also be able to research and develop everything in one campaign. This one should prove winnable, now, I'm confident, especially considering that I can save scum if I need to. It's just a matter of time, I think, but I do need to be diligent in accomplishing the council's goals.